My post relates to developing a counter strategy against a very specific type of fish.

Villain will always donk lead into the preflop aggressor if he flops any pair. I know that this weakens his checking range and as a response we should cbet aggressively in position when he checks. But how to respond when he leads and we have whiffed the flop?

Villain is to our right and is very wide preflop. As a consequence we have been isolating preflop with a wider range.

Example hand: ($600 effective) Limp 3way, V raises SB to 12, Hero 3! BB to 55 with KQ V calls. Flop: JT3. Normally I would be cbetting this board 100%, but V ruins the opportunity by leading for $35, Hero calls. Turn: T. Villain now bets $75 (the larger sizing means he has a v strong hand...he would have bet $35-$45 with any Jx or 3x), Hero calls. River: T. V now overbet shoves for his last $450ish. Hero folds and V shows us QTo for rivered quads.

As evidenced above, V has a tell where he bets large on turns with strong hands and bets close to same size as flop bet with medium strength or worse.

OTTH: ($600 effective) V limps in MP and Hero isos CO to $20 with AJ, only V calls.

Flop: 742

Villain leads for $20, Hero calls. Pot is $80.

Turn: 9

Villain bets $30, Hero folds.

Normally I would cbet flop with bdfd+two overs, but I'm up against a stronger than average range when he donks, so I tend to ease up on bluffs. Is a better response just to raise flop with all our top pairs and strong (8+ out) draws?

Thanks for the feedback.

Villain will always donk lead into the preflop aggressor if he flops any pair.

Then the question becomes how sticky he gets on the next card. If he folds a large amount of the time on the turn to aggression Id pop him on the regular and follow it up with a 2/3 bet on the turn and print money. We have position, if he gives us the lead even when he hits his trips or weird 2 pair we take note and can take a free turn card and stack him on the river when we hit. V's do this because most people are too scared to raise with air and since you miss flops 2/3 of the time it puts them in prime stealing position without having to risk a whole lot. If hes not donking into you with air hes capping his range and telling you he missed and its safe to cbet. If hes checking to you with air and other hands its still very easy to play again him and know what to do if he check/calls, take note and play accordingly.

Your example hand I would raise the flop 100% of the time. The T is the worst card in the deck for your hand because it smashes his range and doesn't hit yours unless you have a fullhouse/quads. Every other card I would have fired another bullet including the J but the T is a check/give up.

Trying to "take back control" of the hand by raising the flop with nothing against a fish is spew. Hero will get called way too often.

When he does he has a piece so fold when you have very little like hand 2 and happily call when you have a good draw like hand 1 because he let you draw cheap rather than check raising you. Villain is playing his hands almost face up on the flop when out of position, exploit it.

If he donk leads every time you should be raising big flop ($110-115) with all of the equity in your hand, and continuing to bet on non-threatening turn cards.

Also, I probably would of flatted his raise pre since we are in position, with a hand that plays good multi-way against a *somewhat* sticky opponent.

Raising someone who donks out with "any pair" is spew?

I said right after that it depends how he reacts on the next card. If he is a calling station with bottom pair then you bet for value and don't bluff. If V is calling reraises to his donks and folding a lot of turns then raising him with a wide range including air and following up with another bet is printing money.

The thing is I don't really know how sticky he is with bottom/middle pair. I do know that he has this bet sizing tell on the turn, where he will sometimes bet really weak (= to flop size) and cap his range. He's straightforward so he should be pretty easy to play against, but I'm still having trouble. Would it be better to float flop really wide and then raise turn when he bets weak? We probably want to raise flop with value like TPGK+, looking to pot control turns with a lot of our weaker hands. But do we want to mix any pure semibluffs in as a flop raise? With a monster like KQ on JT3, I feel like we have such robust equity that raising isn't even really a semibluff here...I wouldn't mind a raise or call OTF.

Call when you have it. Fold when you don't. What am I missing here?
I would float a couple of times and when overcards or scare cards come out on the turn, Bomb it. If he folds in these spots, you have just made your best friend.

So you are saying if he donks with a bad hand on the flop he makes the exact same size bet on the turn sometimes if he doesn't improve and if he hits his 2p/trips on the turn he bets a bigger amount 100% of the time? When you say sometimes what does he do the other times?

What does he do OOP on the flop with his straight/flushdraws?

If you don't know the answer to this question I would say you haven't seen this V play enough to be able to determine whether what you are saying about betting the same on the turn being 100% accurate.

Responding to paragraphs in order:

1. I mean, ya, this is a really common tell among bad players at 1/2, right? They're super transparent with their bet sizing. In all 4 hands I've observed this guy play (small sample I know, but lol live poker), he either goes 35/45 or 20/30, or he goes 35/75 or 20/45. Another example hand, same stack size: V opens 12 (3rd consecutive hand he opened to 12), Hero 3! to 50 with 77, V calls. V donks 986r for $35, Hero calls. V donks 5x (bringing BDFD) for 75, Hero raises to 175, V calls. V donks Jx (completing BDFD) for 100, hero calls. V shows TT and seemed surprised I had a 7. Dude is just clueless at understanding hand strength.

2. Dunno, haven't seen anything like that yet. I assume he plays his draws passively, as x/c, like most 1/2 players, but I could be wrong.

3. I never said this is a common spot, did I? I said this is a very specific Villain type that I dont have a ton of experience facing. It's the opposite of common, it's rare to me.

Didn't see this part because of the edit.

"Sometimes" there just means that he sometimes bets small on the turn. Re his behavior, when he bets small again on the turn, he never has a very good hand like 2pair+. When he bets large on the turn he always has a hand that he thinks is strong (he's a bad hand reader so this could be TT on 9865). His turn bet sizing is highly correlated with his self-perceived hand strength, so much so that it's not a stretch to simplify and say that small bets always mean a weak hand.

Players at 1/2 are never balancing ranges, right? So bet sizes can carry a ton of information.

Obviously the dude is spazzy, so his ranges are surely more fuzzy than I wrote (it may be hard to know what he perceives as a strong hand at any given time). But to first order, it's probably reasonable to assume linear ranges here.

Ok so in the KQs posted its an even easier turn fold because if you hit a pair to improve its likely to give him 2p but how many combos of a T will this V fold to a raise on the flop? Probably a lot of them. You described V as very wide preflop so a raise here folds out T9 T8 T7, maybe T6s/QT/KT. It folds out all 3's which he can have a decent amount of. This stuff I just mentioned is a HUUUUGE amount of combos that he is folding here. It also puts QJ/J9/J8/J7 in a really tough spot where he will probably call and fold to a turn bet. All underpairs fold, There is still a lot of garbage he is going to call once and fold to the turn bet unimproved.

Weighting whether its better to let him show you what he has on the turn with his bet sizing tells or putting big pressure on the flop is up to you. I am not dedicated enough to this game to math out which line is better but either will profitable for you as long as you're going to take the hand away on the turn light and not just wait for good hands to raise the turn with. I am not going to give up many flops against this type of player, we are going to go to war and he will either learn to stop donking into me or he is going to be funding my weekend vacations.

My favorite teacher I follow talks about the difference between 1/3 - 2/5 players and mid stakes players. He says the people who try moving up and always get knocked back down to 2/5 almost always have the same thing in common. They are the ones who never learn to put pressure on people who have very wide ranges.

Aye I misread and edited and Ive edited this post 20 times too. Gotta stop doing that.

I don't see how the villain is going to fund your vacations when you are pumping up the pot everytime when behind. Are you just trying to rep aces every time this happens?

Do we need aces when we are against a V who is donking into us with "any pair" who plays a "very wide range" pre flop?

I don't need to wait for top set to double barrel a fish off of middle pair 2nd kicker but maybe you do.

Be more aggressive. Just calling down your middle pair+ hands is a weak strat that isn't any better than what a fish would do, probably. BOTH his betting and checking ranges have a lot of weak hands in them. I am raising the KQss especially with the BDFD. If he only donks pair+ hands and doesn't have bluffs that will give up I prefer raising the AJdd hand on the flop rather than calling as well.

If you think he always forks his range on the turn by his sizing then there's a really good argument to not have a raising range on the flop, I suppose.

So he will take the donk/call check/fold line with so many weak made hands because his range is so wide that raising the flop and firing turn with our better varieties of air and weak draws in response will be profitable? Do these player types really make big flop calls then fold turns often?

How much of your line is coming from the fact that it's a 3bet pot?